Abyss Deep (22 page)

It turns out that some exotic ices are pretty weird, and appear only under extreme conditions. Ice IX, for instance, forms at pressures of around 3,000 atmospheres and temperatures around 165 degrees Kelvin. Ice X doesn't form until pressures hit 700,000 atmospheres. We're not certain, but we think that at pressures of around one and a half terapascals—­that's almost 15 million atmospheres, or more than 15,500 tons per square centimeter—­water actually becomes a metal. We've never worked with that kind of pressure directly. Even at the core of the Earth, pressures are estimated to reach “only” 3.5 million atmospheres; Jupiter's core may hit around seven terapascals—­or 70 million atmospheres—­enough to create metallic hydrogen.

But what we had in the lab was a sample of Ice VII, and compared to some of the exotic ices we knew, it was pretty tame. The stuff forms at about a thousand atmospheres, and at surprisingly high temperatures—­around minus 3 degrees Centigrade. Odd things happen to the water's hydrogen molecules at that pressure, and the hydrogen bonds actually form interpenetrating lattices. That means there are unusual electrical effects in the material, though we don't understand yet what those might be.

“Electrical effects?”
Haldane
's chief engineering officer, Lieutenant Mikao Ishihara, sounded skeptical. “What electrical effects?”

“I don't know,” I admitted. “I'm not an electrical engineer . . . and so far as I could find through
Haldane
's databases, we haven't studied natural electricity in exotic ice at all. It's an entirely new field.

“But there's more,” I went on. “That ice sample I collected is not pure. Take a closer look at the biostat imagery.” I showed them photomicrographs of the ice . . . backlit white sheets through which darker chains and blobs appeared. A lot of it was diffuse, almost not there at all, like wisps of gray smoke caught frozen in solid ice.

“You can see here . . . and here. That spectrographic analysis I ran picked up substantial amounts of sulfur, iron, copper, carbon, potassium, manganese . . . a whole soup of elements strung through the ice matrix almost like . . . nerves? Blood vessels?”

“Speculation, Mr. Carlyle,” Chief Garner's voice said over the conference link. “We don't
know
. . .”

“No, Chief, I don't. But it's highly suggestive.”

“But what you haven't explained,” Walthers said, “is how a creature made of ice could be that . . . that flexible. Those things were like giant snakes! Ice would shatter if it moved like that!”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “I wondered about that too . . . but it turns out that there are different ways that ice can freeze, quite apart from the fifteen different forms of exotic ice we've been talking about. The variants are called
amorphous ice
. The ice we're familiar with on Earth has a rigid, crystalline structure, but that's actually rare out in space. In places like comets or in the subsurface ice of places like Europa or Pluto—­throughout the universe, in fact—­amorphous ice is the rule.

“There are different types of amorphous ice. They generally require low temperatures with very sudden freezing, like ice cream. If you freeze ice cream too slowly, you get conventional ice crystals. Pressure is also important.

“One type of amorphous ice—­it's called LDA, for low-­density amorphous—­has a melting point of around one hundred twenty or one hundred forty degrees Kelvin—­that's around minus one hundred fifty Celsius. Above that temperature, it's actually an extremely viscous form of water. You might get that effect by manipulating the pressure in various ways too. A sudden lowering of pressure will cause sudden cooling, for instance.”

“Actually, that problem is trivial,” Ortega said. “You don't need LDAs. We've had pumpable ice technology for centuries, now, with tiny ice particles suspended as a slurry in brine or refrigerants. The ice flows like jelly.”

“A gigantic worm made of ice,” Montgomery said, staring off into space. “With viscous-­water-­jelly muscles . . .”

“Maybe,” I said. “This is all still guesswork. But there's also
this
. . . .”

I showed them more test results, these from samples of strands running through the Ice VII that also appeared to be water ice . . . but they were different.

“These structures appear to be a different type of exotic ice,” I told them. “Specifically, Ice XI, running everywhere through the main body of the sample. We've found Ice XI on Earth—­inside the Antarctic ice sheet. It's actually a stable form of Ice I
h
, with an orthorhombic structure and—­here's the important part—­it's ferroelectric.”

That meant that the polarization of its atoms could be reversed by an external electrical field, that it could actually store electricity like a natural capacitor, and that it could carry an electrical current.

You could actually use such a system to store electronic data.

“We used to use ferroelectric RAM in some computers on Earth, and for memory in RFID chips,” Chief Garner pointed out. “It's old tech, but it works. You can also use ferroelectric effects in memory materials—­in a matrix that has one shape when an electrical current is running through it, and a different shape when the current is switched off.”

I nodded. “I think that the cuttlewhales are gigantic electrical motors, using organic electricity to generate movement in their analog of musculature. I think they have a kind of built-­in computer RAM, probably billions upon billions of bytes of it, probably distributed throughout their bodies. And I have the distinct feeling that a cuttlewhale isn't so much a life form as it is a . . . a
machine
. Something created by,
manufactured
by . . . something else.”

Consternation broke out around the table, and in the in-­head connection as well. “Wait a second, Carlyle,” Walthers said. “You're saying the cuttlewhales are
machines
?”

“Robots!” Hancock said. “They're fucking
robots
!”

“Something like that,” I admitted. I held up a cautioning hand. “Look, I'm not saying they're
not
the product of natural evolution. They may well be. But we shouldn't discount the possibility that somebody else designed and assembled them. It would be
very
hard to explain how various ices could come together by chance in a way that worked so elegantly . . . complete with distributed natural data processing based on old AI models.”

“Be careful, Mr. Carlyle,” Ortega told me. “That's the argument used by the so-­called Creationists of a few hundred years ago . . . that life on Earth was too complex to have been brought about by accidental, natural processes. Given enough time, natural processes can manufacture some
wonderful
things.”

“Of course, sir,” I said. “But . . . there's something else you all should consider.”

“What's that?”

“Sunlight, sir. On Earth, it only penetrates about one hundred fifty meters into the ocean. Actually, most light goes no deeper than the top ten meters . . . but by the time you reach one hundred fifty meters, it's completely dark. Here, with the red sunlight, it's probably less . . . and under the ice, on the nightside of the planet . . . well, there's no light entering the ocean at all.”

“So?” Walthers demanded. “What are you getting at?”

“
Eyes
,” I replied. “The cuttlewhales have
eyes
. Six of them. If they evolved far enough down that they developed under high pressures, why do they have
eyes
?”

“Those might not be eyes,” Ortega said, but he sounded unsure. “I wish you could have picked one of them up and brought it along. We might know more. . . .”

“Sorry, sir, but I wasn't going to wait around out there on the ice any longer than I absolutely had to. But . . . I wonder. If the cuttlewhales were designed, if they were manufactured somehow by another intelligence . . . maybe they were given eyes in order to explore the surface remotely.”

“Huh,” Garner said. “Like our remote probes.”

“That is an enormous leap, Carlyle,” Walthers said. “Kind of a leap of faith, isn't it?”

“I suppose so, sir. But it's something to think about.”

“Over a long-­enough period of time,” Ortega said, thoughtful, “a deep-­benthic life form might move to the surface and evolve vision . . . then migrate back to the depths. . . .”

I shrugged and spread my hands. “Look, all of this is pure speculation at this point. I'm just suggesting that we should keep in mind the
possibility
that the cuttlewhales are . . . artificial. That would certainly have an effect on our mission, wouldn't it?”

“To say the least,” Montgomery said. She still looked like she was in shock. “Just where would they have evolved in Abyssworld's ocean? Or . . . where would they have been created, if that's the right term? How far down?”

I shook my head. I had numbers, but no proof, nothing solid. “Well, you need a water pressure of around a thousand atmospheres to turn ordinary water into Ice VII. That's not too extreme, as exotic ices go. You find that at a depth of ten thousand meters on Earth . . . or about eleven thousand meters on Abyssworld. Eleven kilometers down . . .”

“That's only a thousandth of the way to the sea floor,” Walthers pointed out.

“My God. What are the pressures like at the bottom of Abyssworld's ocean?” Ortega asked.

“I was wondering about that myself, sir,” I replied, “and I did some simple calcs. On Earth, water pressure increases by one atmosphere—­that's over a hundred thousand Pascals—­for every ten meters you descend. Abyssworld's gravity is only ninety-­one percent of Earth's, and there's a direct one-­to-­one correlation between the weight of the water and the pressure it exerts, so call it nine hundred ten thousand atmospheres.

“That's a skull-­crushing thousand
tons
or so pressing down on every square centimeter.”

“What happens to water ice at that depth?” Garner asked.

“I don't know,” I said. “Nobody does. One possibility is that the bottom of Abyssworld's ocean—­maybe even the bottom three or four or five thousand kilometers of it—­isn't liquid water anymore. It might be a highly compressed slurry or ice-­slush composed of several exotic ices, kind of like the jelly Dr. Ortega mentioned. Heat from the planet's core might create convection currents, so it would be constantly circulating. It certainly would be a very strange environment. We don't know enough, though, to know
how
strange.”

“What kind of life might we find down
there
?” Montgomery asked.

It was a rhetorical question, I knew, but I couldn't resist answering. I'd been wondering a lot about the same thing.

“Just about anything is possible, ma'am,” I told her. “With heat from the planet's core, with water and various nutrients, salts, metals, stuff like that from sea-­floor vents, there's no telling what might have evolved down there.”

For the first time in our discussion, one of the Brocs chimed in, its words written out by the ship's AI within our in-­heads.
I
T IS VITAL THAT Y
OU REMEMBER,
D'drevah wrote,
THAT MO
ST LIFE IN THE UNIVE
RSE LIVES IN PLACES
LIKE
A
BYSSWORLD'S DE
PTHS, AND NOT NAKEDL
Y EXPOSED ON THE ROC
KY SURFACES OF PLANETS LIKE
M
'G
AT OR
E
ARTH.

I thought again about the Medusae of Europa.

“Okay,” Walthers said. “That's all well and good, but I don't see how it will affect us. We don't have the technology to explore such depths.”

“We might be able to probe those depths with sonar,” Montgomery suggested.

“I submit, madam,” Garner's voice replied, “that it was sonar that attracted the cuttlewhales in the first place. They appeared almost immediately after the Marines began using high-­power, low-­frequency sonar through the ice. It's possible that Murdock Base was destroyed when they tried the same thing. Perhaps we should leave well enough alone.”

“I have a question,” Ortega said. “If the cuttlewhales were formed at a pressure of a thousand atmospheres, why don't they explode on the surface? You know, like deep-­sea fish brought up from extreme depths?”

“Actually, sir, the ones we encountered on the surface were beginning to degrade,” I told him. “I don't think they can survive very long at surface temperatures and pressures. But those fish you mention explode because gas in their swim bladders expands as they're brought to the surface—­expands a
lot
. I think the cuttlewhales must have some sort of internal mechanism that keeps their internal pressure balanced with what's outside. We know they have a gullet . . . but that might close completely at high pressure. And we don't know what they use for a heart. Not a conventional pump like ours, certainly. They're too big. They may rely on seawater diffusing throughout their bodies.”

“Solid-­state bodies, then,” Ortega mused.

“Essentially, yes.”

“Robots,” Hancock said.

“At the surface, or in warm temperatures,” I went on, “Ice VII starts to . . .
unravel
is the best word I can think of. It requires high pressure to keep the ice crystals in that configuration, with the interpenetrating lattices . . . but when the pressure goes away, it doesn't explode. It just kind of oozes into the new state.”

“The question remains,” Walthers said, “as to whether any of this helps us at all. Can we even hope to talk to these things? Or to . . . to their manufacturers?”